* Posts by Steven Roper

1832 publicly visible posts • joined 10 May 2011

Google to show China what it's missing

Steven Roper
Stop

And pray tell

If not the main oligarchy of Labour and Conservative / Labor and Liberal / Republican and Democrat, who would you have people vote for? The Greens, who would have us all heading back to the caves as hunter-gatherers? The BNP / Australia First / National Front, who would hang anyone with non-white ancestry? Or one of the many single-issue parties like the Sex Party or the Pirate Party, who would focus on their single point of interest to the detriment of the rest of the structure of civilisation?

People aren't sheep. They just don't have anyone worthwhile to vote for. If a party came along and offered a balanced perspective whereby the needs and well-being of the public is respected as opposed to the crony corporatism we are burdened with today, we'd be onto a winner. But sadly, there is nobody like that - in any country.

1930s photos show Greenland glaciers retreating faster than today

Steven Roper
Trollface

This is interesting

"Other scientists have said recently that late-20th-century temperature rises in the Arctic may result largely from clean-air legislation intended to deal with acid rain: some have even gone so far as to suggest that rapid coal- and diesel-fuelled industrialisation in China is serving to prevent further warming right now."

So, as I see it, AGW is happening because we've stopped pumping shit into the atmosphere? Now that's AGW I can believe in. Let's bring back the old mile-per-gallon big-block V8s and get those factory chimneys belching!

Publishing barons: Free speech a 'cloak for tawdry theft'

Steven Roper
Thumb Up

@Ben Tasker Re: They don't have fundamental rights

A very good post, upvoted.

You mention pricing as a problem, and while for some it is, I don't see it as being the major cause of infringement. The major problem is, first and foremost, geolocation, region-locking and restricted regional releases, and secondly, the problems caused for legitimate customers by DRM primarily designed to enforce the same restrictions.

This restriction-by-region is the biggest piece of two-faced hypocrisy on the part of Big Media in history. They extol the advantages of globalisation when it lets them outsource jobs to third-world countries for cheap labour, putting millions of people out of work and wrecking the Western economy, but they don't want Johnny Public to enjoy the same benefits - such as being able to buy media cheaply from a third-world country or from the first country it's released in - and that is what region-locking is all about. It's OK for them, but not OK for us.

So this region-locking and geolocation bullshit has to stop. Big media has to be forced to understand that if they want to take they have to give as well. The internet has enabled globalisation for the whole world, and the unfair and idiotic notion of release by country no longer has any validity as a business model.

For example, I recently read a report that Australians are the biggest pirates of the popular fantasy series Game of Thrones. The reason is 1) it's only shown on Foxtel here, and Foxtel, the greedy bastards, exploit it by only making it available if you buy their most expensive plan - around $60 a month. But more importantly, 2) they only release each episode a week after its initial airdate.

This precludes Australians from all the online discussion in Facebook, forums and blogs that takes place after each episode airs. And that is the single major reason cited by people as to why they pirate the show. Not cost so much as location restricted release. Huge numbers said they would be willing to pay to get each episode if they could get it as soon as it aired, but they can't. So people can't talk about the show with their overseas friends online because of the idiocy of regional restrictions.

Once the industry wakes up to the fact that people outright refuse to be shafted by this hypocritical region-locking crap and accepts that simultaneous worldwide releases are the only way they're going to make any money from their work, the sooner the piracy problem will be reduced to insignificance and the sooner we can all move on from this stupid copyright war.

Free Windows 8 desktop app development is dead

Steven Roper
Stop

Re: Evaluating thumbs down

Lockwood didn't seem to me to be whining about being thumbed down, they were merely curious about what the reasoning behind being thumbed down might be. Which to me is a fair thing to ask - if someone goes to the trouble of composing and posting a comment and people downvote it, what's wrong with wanting to know why? If they made an error, at least point out what the error is so the person can correct their knowledge.

Steven Roper
WTF?

Re: Out of their minds

Say what?

"75% of all computers sold in recent years have been laptops, not desktops! "

Do you have a source for that statistic? Or, more likely, did you just pull that number out of your arse?

"...weirdoes out there still using desktops with mice would have us believe."

Erm... if only weirdoes are still using desktops with mice, then every single company we do business with at work, and the vast majority of of our customers, and my parents and friends, and their friends, in fact just about every single person I know must be a weirdo. Strange that.

I have a tablet PC and a laptop, and most people I've encountered have laptops, some have tablets, but all of them use these devices in addition to using desktop computers.

The keyboard/mouse combo is far from dead, Sean. In fact, it'll likely be around for many years to come, simply because it's the optimal way to interface with a computer. In pretty much the same way as the steering wheel, accelerator and brake pedal combo has been around now for coming up on a century, because it's the optimal way to control a car.

Agriboffins' site downed by DDoS after GM protest

Steven Roper
Thumb Up

Re: Luddites wanting us to move back to the caves

They do indeed.

See this El Reg report on the WWF's latest efforts if you want proof.

These tree-hugging idiots won't be happy until the whole human race has reverted to the chimpanzee stage.

Self-driving Volvos cover 200km of busy Spanish motorway

Steven Roper

Re: Worried

The most stupid thing about all this is the mass media hysteria that will ensue the moment something does go wrong with a computer driven car.

A meatsack driver crashing a car and killing someone is such a commonplace occurrence that it might - just might - be mentioned in a Page 35 police news boxout in the local rag.

The first time a computer driver crashes a car and kills someone, it'll be international front-page news on every two-bit rag from the Daily Fail to the New Jerk Times. Then there'll be the inevitable rants for this evil, destructive technology to be banned and restricted into uselessness, even though it will probably have killed less than a hundredth of the people that meatsack drivers kill every day.

Trekkie wants to build USS Enterprise … in twenty years

Steven Roper
Thumb Up

Re: A journey to Alpha Centauri

Sean Ellis & Chemist: You probably have the right of it; I thought the energy requirement I'd computed seemed rather low, since I'd originally considered that the actual energy required would be a sizeable fraction of the Sun's entire output for several weeks' worth. I must have dropped a zero or three somewhere...

Unfortunately I didn't have time to check the figures and revise my calculations though, since I posted my original comment while at work, so I'll go with your revisions and agree that it's a Reg-unit fuckton of energy required to achieve this kind of acceleration!

As to a drive mechanism, the sort of thing I had in mind is what I call a RAP - Relativistic Accelerated Particle - drive. I imagine something along the lines of some kind of synchrotron based around a few hundred thousand tons of microscopic black hole, at which you fire ionised hydrogen nuclei (eg protons) almost tangentially to the black hole's event horizon. This would accelerate said protons to very close to the speed of light.

At such speeds, relativistic mass dilation comes into play, to the point where you could potentially increase the effective mass of a proton all the way up to a few kilograms. Then you fire said proton out the back, generating several kilograms of Newtonian thrust for the price of 1 proton. With such a system, an Olympic swimming pools' worth of hydrogen (perhaps stored as water or ammonia) would give you potentially years of 1G continuous thrust.

(BTW I hereby claim this post as prior art on this drive system to prevent some greedy bastard patenting it in future!)

Steven Roper
Boffin

A journey to Alpha Centauri

at an acceleration of 1G would not take nine years.

As I've posted elsewhere in these forums, I worked out what would be involved relativistically in making such a journey, and came up with some fascinating concepts.

First, if you accelerate continuously at 1G (9.8 m/s/s), you will approach c in 354.3 days - 10 days shy of 1 year. Let's call it a year for ease of calculation.

So it will take you a year to get up to c and another year to slow down, meaning that the minimum Earth time for your journey will be at least 2 years.

So a journey to Alpha Centauri would, by our clocks, take about 6 years - 1 year to get up to speed, 4 years to cover the distance, an another year to slow back down at Alpha Centauri. (I know, I'm not factoring in the distance covered during acceleration / deceleration, but let's keep it simple!)

For the crew of the ship, however, the journey would take only slightly more than 2 years - because if they get close enough to c, that 4-year near-light-speed trip will be relativistically time-dilated down to almost nothing. At 0.999999c, 4 years goes by in a few minutes.

This holds true regardless of the objective length of the journey. A trip to Tau Ceti would take around 13 years by our clocks - 1 year speed-up, 11 year travel time, 1 year slow down. But for the crew of the ship, it would still only take 2 years, if you could get the ship close enough to c that that 11 years passes in a few minutes by relativistic time dilation.

The practical upshot of this is that for an interstellar voyage of any length - be it to Alpha Centauri or the far side of the Virgo-Coma Supercluster - the voyage, to the ship's crew, will always be slightly more than two years. Granted, for the latter journey, the Sun will have expanded to a red giant and gutted the Earth by the time they get back; but for them it will still have been only a 4-year cruise.

This is technically achievable with today's technology, with one small problem: accelerating a decently-sized ship at 1G for a whole year (and back down again) is going to suck a whole lot of energy. 1G comes out to about 10J/kg/s, so if we assume a GVM of 10,000 t for the ship, that's 10,000,000 kg x 30612245 s * 10J = 3,061.2 Terajoules of energy, and that's not accounting for the relativity-dilated mass of the ship near the speed of light.

As a comparison, the Earth receives 17,000 Terajoules of energy from the Sun every second, so while the energy requirement for the ship is large, it's not insurmountable. Once we master fusion or even anti-matter-matter reactions, we're on our way to the stars.

Just don't expect anyone you know to still be alive by the time you get back if you take a jaunt to anywhere further than Arcturus!

World+Dog to demand ever larger tablet-phones

Steven Roper
Go

Reminds me

of that episode of Corner Gas where Brent and Davis are having penis wars over who has the smallest phone. They keep buying smaller and smaller phones to outdo each other, until Wanda mocks them by calling them "small-phone", at which point Brent and Davis start toting 90s-style housebrick phones instead.

Brent Butt was a prophet. First the phones got smaller, now they're getting bigger again...

SpaceX does what it HASN'T done before: Dragon in close ISS flyby

Steven Roper
Devil

Re: Great but oversold?

"The biggest achievement of SpaceX is in doing what they've done at a low cost. That's the advantage of a private enterprise over a government programme. It's also the future of space development."

The only problem with that approach is that it starts with SpaceX and ends with Weyland-Yutani.

The most dangerous job in America: Keeping iPhones connected

Steven Roper
FAIL

Re: @Uncle Bernie

"And THIS attitude, folks, is why I detest racists and bigots."

Excuse me? Detesting Apple fanbois is racist now? How to undermine a cause over trivia!

There ought to be a Godwin's law for the word "racist".

Steven Roper
Mushroom

@Uncle Bernie

"As an iPhone user, I have to say I do not give a shit. They are lucky they are working."

And THIS attitude, folks, is why I detest Apple and its fanbois and refuse to allow them or their products on my property.

I hope your iPhone's batteries explode and blow your bollocks off, then I won't give a shit.

Volvo claims V40 is first car with an airbag for pedestrians

Steven Roper
Flame

Re: How much?

"To the point where I've now read that owners are buying parts to disable the pedestrian safety features."

And I'd like to see anyone who does that and subsequently kills someone, charged with murder - not manslaughter - because such an act is a deliberate and pre-meditated action intended to take a life in order to save the selfish bastard behind the wheel a bit of money.

Minimum mandatory sentence of 25 years, too. Is that worth saving a couple of grand to you?

Ouch! Facebook slumps below IPO value on day 2

Steven Roper
Thumb Up

Re: Once upon a time...

Yeah, but that particular investment did eventually pay off as I recall, albeit only after a stiff climb and a few life-threatening situations endured by the investor.

Investing in Facebook on the other hand...

Call of Duty hacker behind bars after college burglary

Steven Roper
Mushroom

And when he gets out in 18 months or less

He can just nick over to Costa Rica where an untouchable fat bank account is waiting for him.

This is where you need an international vigilante squad to go over there and take him out the moment he shows up there.

Seeing ads on Wikipedia? Then you're infected

Steven Roper

Have a look

at mark 63's post above. He wants Wikipedia to have advertising, and refuses to donate because they don't.

If that isn't trolling, I don't know what is.

Compare The Market can't touch web filth extension - simples

Steven Roper

That's exactly why

.com is considered by many to be the only TLD that matters.

Child support IT fail: Deadbeat mums 'n' dads off the hook

Steven Roper
Boffin

I noticed

'the commission had discovered that the opening arrears balances on these cases had not been entered onto the clerical database'

and

'a number of cases managed using the clerical database, had "not been maintained accurately in respect of the maintenance due"'

So, that's a data entry problem, not a design issue. It always annoys me when programmers are given the flack for system failures when it's the fault of the client for not inputting the data correctly in the first place, an issue I and my team have to deal with on an almost daily basis. Does nobody understand GIGO* any more?

*A principle of information processing established way back in the dim depths of the 20th century, meaning Garbage In, Garbage Out.

Mobile fee dodgers will get away with enough cash to bail out Greece

Steven Roper

Yes, I noticed the ITAR bit too

And I must say, it can't be all that effective, since trying to contain information in today's world is a bit like pissing in a colander, and in any event sanctioned countries (Iran comes to mind) would simply hoist a big fat middle finger to any attempts by the US to prevent them from developing their own strong encryption, even if they could contain what's already been developed.

I personally think ITAR restrictions would be the least part of the problem discussed in the article. The US is delusional if it thinks it controls the flow of information to such a degree. But then they are home to organisations like Apple and the RIAA, to name just two aspects of such controlling mentality, so I could be overestimating them.

Roman roads get the web maps treatment

Steven Roper
Thumb Up

These scholars are crazy...

...by Toutatis!

'Catastrophic' Avira antivirus update bricks Windows PCs

Steven Roper
Thumb Up

Re: Instincts

I used to to have Avira AntiVir on my system a few years ago, back when I was playing World of Warcraft.

Then the fucking thing minimised WoW, while I was tanking in an instance thus causing a group wipe, merely to show me a fucking ADVERT to try to get me to "upgrade" to the paid version.

Needless to say, it was immediately uninstalled, and subsequently no Avira product has gone anywhere near any computer under my control since. Behaviour like that is as bad as the malware it purports to protect against.

Why GM slammed the brakes on its $10m Facebook ads

Steven Roper
Facepalm

Re: As a test, if you're an adblock+ user...

Just did that, because I've been using AdBlock+ for years, and I haven't looked at the Internet without it for quite some time. Your post made me think I'd have a look, so I checked out El Reg, Demonoid, Listverse, Mental Floss, W3Schools, YouTube and Facebook with it switched off and...

...Holy Mother of God...

...AdBlock+ is back on now, and will be staying that way for the foreseeable future.

D'oh icon because mfw I saw those sites with ads.

Steven Roper
Thumb Up

Re: The clever analysts...

...As anyone who has ever worked in a shopping mall can tell you firsthand!

Gates' Corbis busted again for fraud

Steven Roper

Question:

Does anyone know if America actually has a final, ultimate court, beyond which it is not possible to appeal (like Australia's High Court), or can you simply continue appealing ad infinitum or until the party with the least money runs out of steam?

Only global poverty can save the planet, insists WWF - and the ESA!

Steven Roper
Thumb Up

Strange people fallen from the nut tree

Definitely. I've been saying for years that these eco-fascist bastards (WWF, Greenpeace, PETA etc) won't be happy until they've got us all living in caves. And a lot of people around me told me (with varying degrees of politeness) that I might be exaggerating just a bit.

Well, this is the ultimate vindication!

I'll be showing this report around the office to all the green-loving idiots who actually gave money to these wankers on their last donation drive. Hopefully the total donation from our company next time will be a big fat ZERO.

GPS rival Beidou will cover Asia Pac by end of the year

Steven Roper
Headmaster

You say Beidou, I say Baidu

And I managed to pronounce both as "Buy-doo". Can someone please enlighten me how these two names might be pronounced differently?

Game goes titsup in Australia

Steven Roper
Thumb Up

Re: Titsup?

From where I'm sitting, looks to me like you're the one that's hanging upside down mate!

Grab your L-plates, flying cars of sci-fi dreams have landed

Steven Roper
Boffin

@ Michael Shaw

Sorry, I am right. You said it yourself: the lift <-> weight part of that formula is exactly what I'm talking about. The weight is the downward acceleration of 9.8 m/s/s imparted by gravity; the lift is the 9.8 m/s/s upward acceleration imparted by whatever means the aircraft is using to generate it, be that means air pressure along a wing surface, the displacement of a column of air by a rotor, the counterpressure of a jet engine, or the Newtonian thrust of a rocket.

A glider with zero forward velocity will fall out of the sky like a lead weight until it gains enough momentum to allow its wing surface to generate the equivalent lift required to counter the weight acceleration of gravity. However the craft does it, that 9.8 m/s/s downward acceleration has to be countered. That's basic high-school physics.

Steven Roper
Stop

Re: Power requirements

Any form of flight will have vastly greater power requirements than ground travel. This is because in order to fly, you have to overcome gravity (duh!).

Now gravity is a constant downward acceleration of 9.8 m/s/s. This translates, in carspeak, to 0 - 100 km/h (62 mph) in 2.8 seconds. That's right, the acceleration imparted by gravity is greater than that of any production sports car, and greater than that of most sports motorbikes. You show me any commercially available ground vehicle capable of 0-100 km/h in 2.8 seconds! Even if there is one that I don't know about, I'd wager its fuel consumption would be a strong discouragement to commuter use!

In order to fly, any vehicle must overcome this downward acceleration with an equivalent upward acceleration. That means consuming the equivalent power required to accelerate from 0-100 in 2.8 s constantly, every second it's in the air, just to hover or maintain altitude. If it needs to climb, it has to surpass this power consumption; that is, be able to achieve the equivalent of 0-100 in less than 2.8 s!

This is why even little Cessnas have the equivalent of a Dodge Viper motor under the bonnet. It's the reason why aircraft get such shitty per-litre mileage. It's why flying is such a major cause of emissions. And it's why flying vehicles en masse is completely impractical - because it will, no matter how efficient we make such vehicles, always consume much more power than ground travel, just to stay in the air.

Amnesty International UK site flung Gh0st RAT at surfers after hack

Steven Roper
Thumb Up

I always thought it was

"When we hang the capitalists, they will sell us the rope we use."

Third teen TeamPoison hack suspect quizzed by cyber-cops

Steven Roper
Facepalm

What's the bet

this guy comes up with a diagnosis of Asperger's Syndrome at some point during the trial? Most likely right after he's found guilty and is facing jail for umpteen years...

I lay odds of 8:1 in favour.

Google's self-driving car snags first-ever license in Nevada

Steven Roper
Pint

Re: Potential cash cow?

Not only will they slow down on passing advertisers' billboards and shops, the GPS will "mysteriously" plot a circuitous and serpentine route from A to B that will take you slowly past every advertiser in the country.

Birmingham to London via Leeds, Norwich and Exeter anyone?

Steven Roper
Go

Re: Taxis will be second

"Hi! I'm Johnnycab! Where can I take you tonight?"

Wonderful - a taxi that automatically rams the nearest building and explodes in a huge fireball when some chav fare-dodges, instead of just shouting and beating the shit out of them.

'ACTA is dead,' says Europe's digital doyenne

Steven Roper
Thumb Up

@ Jeebus Re: Orlowski

Nah, that post doesn't quite read like Orlowski. It's too up itself. Andrew at least makes an effort to put some justification into his rants. That particular one reads more like something Turtle would write.

US, Euro e-car makers back 'standard' AC/DC jack

Steven Roper
Stop

Re: What was wrong...with micro USB

Well, for one thing, maybe astromech droids like R2D2 need to be able to tell the difference between a data port and a power socket?

Megan Fox fingers fondleslab in sexy store promo

Steven Roper
Thumb Up

...youngsters even now drooling over the pic...

Phew (or should that be Phwoar), I'm still a youngster then, even at 45! Thanks for the compliment guys.

iPad chargers can open beer bottles

Steven Roper
Stop

Which will no doubt will only make the lawyers richer

since Apple will have patented bottle openers before that happens.

Chinese passports to get chipped

Steven Roper
Stop

10 million passport holders

out of a country of 1,347,350,000 people.

That comes out to about 0.74 per cent of the population are allowed to leave the country, less than 1%.

In this age when we like to compare our (UK, USA, Aus etc) governments to that of China, this sorta puts things back in perspective. Lest we forget the Bamboo Curtain, like the Iron Curtain of Cold War provenance, is there to keep people in, not out. Because communism works, right?

Virgin Media cuts Pirate Bay access for millions of punters

Steven Roper
Facepalm

Re: No, You need to get real.

You do realise, Doug Glass / JimC / PirateSlayer / Turtle, that downvotes still count against your named account even when you post AC, don't you?

Glider pilot 'swallowed camera memory' say plunge tragedy cops

Steven Roper

Re: "....we are in the waiting stages right now."

There is one. But instead of a paperclip, you just need a pair of rubber gloves.

>snap< >snap< >ooOOOOEERR!!<

Botnet army flicks 'off' switch at UK crime agency website

Steven Roper
Thumb Up

Re: Public overreaction in Daily Mails

The unit you refer to should actually be in microDailyMails (μDMs) because, just as 1 c is the maximum possible speed of sheep in a vacuum, 1 DailyMail is the maximum possible amount of public overreaction to any conceivable event.

Therefore, where μDM = any possible amount of public overreaction, the range is 0 < μDM < 1. Note that zero is impossible to achieve because there is always some public overreaction; likewise 1 is impossible to achieve (except in the pages of the Daily Mail itself) because total public overreaction (100% of the population) would result in the total collapse of civilisation past the Daily Mail Event Horizon (otherwise known as the Daily Mail comments pages.)

Why embossed credit cards are here to stay

Steven Roper

Re: A minor irritation with the numbers

I also do exactly this on my company's websites.

It's a single line of code, along the lines of:

$ccpan = preg_replace('/\D/', '', $_POST['ccpan'] );

So there's really no excuse, and any programmer that doesn't do it is either incompetent or just plain fucking lazy, or both, and should be sacked forthwith.

Steven Roper

Re: That wouldn't be in the US...

The other big clue about that not being in the US is the use of the word "petrol" as opposed to "gas"...

Baidu sets up shop in Australia

Steven Roper

The first searches

I do on baidu.com.au (when it comes online) will be "Tiananmen Square Massacre", "Falun Gong", and "Free Tibet". If the first page of results link to Tank Man or pages about freeing Tibet I'll definitely consider switching from Google. If the search gets blocked or redirected to Communist Party propaganda, then I won't be. That's my acid test for them.

The question is, will Baidu extend Chinese censorship and propaganda beyond their borders or not?

Star Trek's Wesley Crusher blasts Google+ landgrab

Steven Roper
FAIL

Re: What social sites ...

Both Facebook and Google+ clearly state in their ToS that they will terminate your account if they find out that you've supplied a false name, and they won't allow you to use a single nom-de-plume; you have to supply a first and last name.

Facebook button triggers tidal wave of human organs

Steven Roper
Thumb Up

Re: Breaking News ....

Hello, errr, can we have your liver?

Steven Roper
Thumb Up

Liver and onions?

I prefer mine with some fava beans and a nice chianti...

Computer prices down 8.1% per year … since 1984

Steven Roper
Stop

Re: Cost of living increase benign?

"Average house sizes in Oz have gone from approx 150sqm (1500sq ft or so) to over 240sqm (2400 sqft)"

That's true for the new McMansions getting built, but 1) plot sizes have halved since the 70s, so 2) most of those houses have no garden to speak of, the house goes practically to the fence line as a result.

My parents' place, which they bought in 1974, is around 160 sqm - but it's on a 1/4 acre block, and actually has a front and back yard. Just up the road from them is a 'new' estate (now about 10 years old) with an average block size of 1/8 acre. The effect is visually startling. My name for the new estate - Sardine City - reasonably conveys that visual impact.

Yet the valuation on my parents' house is around $430,000, and one of the McMansions near there recently sold for $480,000. So it's not house size that has much to do with the ludicrous prices mate. It's rank greed on the part of baby boomer property investors, the government, and real estate companies. A difference of 11% for a house three times the size IS an apples to apples comparison.

iTunes fanbois outraged by Apple's sex-life quiz probe

Steven Roper
Devil

@ Graham Marsden

Not really a good question, since it's a yes-no answer, giving crooks a 50% chance of getting it. Oh wait, scratch that: you're pretty guaranteed to get it right by simply answering "no", since given Apple's track record of deliberately bricking jailbroken devices, no fanboi would actually admit to having jailbroken one to Apple, even if they have.